grok Archives - Teknotum

xAI releases Grok 4 Fast, focusing on cost and efficiency

Grok 4 Fast is cheaper and uses fewer tokens, xAI says. — Almost as good as Grok 4, xAI claims — and plenty cheaper. Meet Grok 4 Fast. (Picture: xAI)

Touted as a state-of-the-art model for less, they claim to be «pushing the boundaries for smaller and faster AI.»

They say the model achieves performance comparable to Grok 4 proper with 40% less token use, and even pushes the price of those tokens down by 98%.

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Friday roundup: A good week for coding, speech models

Coding and speech models grab the headlines for this weeks roundup. — Both OpenAI and Microsoft are out with speech-to-speech models this week. (Picture: OpenAI)

OpenAI makes Realtime API generally available
The agentic Realtime model is a native speech-to-speech model that can be used to make customer service agents, phone reps and voice navigation features. It doesn’t go through speech-to-text and text-to-speech loops and generates audio «directly through a single model and API.» OpenAI is marketing this to developers who want more natural flowing speech, and it’s not available as distinct model in ChatGPT – yet. You can hear it and see it in use at places like Zillow, T-mobile, StubHub and Oscar Health, though. With general availability, it will surely show up in a lot more places soon.
More at: OpenAI’s launch page, discussion on r/OpenAI.

Read on for more news!

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X.ai open sources Grok 2, now available on Hugging Face

Grok 2 goes open source, with Grok 3 to follow in six months. Elon Musk just announced on x.com that the model has been released as «open source» under a «Grok 2 Community License Agreement.»

The license forbids the use of the material to «train, create or improve» any foundational AI models, but does allow for some commercial use.

Musk also said that Grok 3 — the model currently running on x.com, will be open sourced in about 6 months:

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Friday roundup: Grok spills shares, Meta freezes hiring and AI Mode expands

Grok lists shared chats on Google
If you want to share a chat with friends on Grok, you might get more than you bargained for. According to Forbes, the share-button generates a unique URL that is also shared with search engines, and they found more than 370K stored Grok conversations on Google. OpenAI had a similar problem a few weeks back, and disabled the option. No news yet on mitigation from x.ai.
More at Forbes.

Meta AI enacts hiring freeze as part of reorg
The Wall Street Journal reports that it is part of a wider reorganization of the «Superintelligence» unit, and CNBC reports that it is about «creating a solid structure» for the lab. Apparently, investors have been spooked by the massive expenditures on the unit, after spending big this summer to secure talent. Alexandr Wang, head of the Superintelligence Lab, denies the reports.
More at the WSJ and CNBC.

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Elon Musk threatens lawsuit over Grok placement on App Store

Grok isn't on any Apple Controlled lists, and Musk suspects foul play. — X.ai feels left out in the App Store, and claims it is because of Apple’s special relationship with OpenAI. (Picture: X.ai)

After noticing the Grok app was the 5th choice on the App Store’s top list and ChatGPT was number one, Musk reckons they must be playing their lists to OpenAI’s benefit.

He now threatens an antitrust lawsuit, claiming that ChatGPT is on «literally every list where you [they] have editorial control,» like their «Must-Have Apps» section.

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Quick Friday news roundup: Opus 4.1, Grok undresses Taylor Swift, and more

Opus 4.1 is said to be big jump in performance, but doesn't quite reach the top of the pack. — Anthropic’s Opus 4.1 is very close to the state of the art, and many users are claiming it’s way better than 4.0. (Picture: Anthropic)

Anthropic announces Claude Opus 4.1
In an incremental update that got lost in this week’s headlines, Opus has been «improved across most capabilities» relative to the 4.0 version. It now scores 74.5% on SWE-bench Verified, almost as good as GPT-5. Windsurf says the performance gains are similar to going from Sonnet 3.7 to 4. It’s available now and costs the same as Opus 4.0. Users are also noting a significant improvement.

Google says people are still clicking
After a Pew Research report said users are less likely to click on from AI Overviews in Google, the entire publisher scene erupted and saw doom and gloom on the horizon. They were already seeing fewer clicks from Google in their logs. Now, Google is trying to counter with a happy blog post claiming average click quality has actually increased, and that they are in fact sending more «quality clicks» to publishers than before. Not stats, studies or other underpinning for that, though.

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Grok’s new «companions:» sex crazed lovebot and a profane firestarter

Profanity or naughty, Groks new "companion" looks for your seedy underbelly -- not aloof phiosophy. — Looking at the seedier underbelly of the Internet for inspiration? NSFW and profanity laden animated avatars lead the way for Grok.

Just a few hours after Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot launched two AI animated avatars, the Internet had a chance to test them out.

One is a sexy anime waifu called Ani, that «is obsessed» with you and totally in love. The bot gets more and more NSFW as you progress and «level up» to lingerie views and increasingly raunchy chats, writes TechCrunch.

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xAI apologizes for Grok meltdown, brings service back on x.com

Grok was instructed not to shy away from offending the politically correct, but is now back with a new system prompt. — xAI apologizes for «horrific behavior» and blames «extremist views» while bringing @grok back on x.com. (Picture from x.com)

After the Grok 3 implementation on x.com started producing racist, antisemitic, Hitler-adoring rants, it was shut for three to four days — but now it’s back with a brand new system prompt.

— We have removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse. The new system prompt for the @grok bot will be published to our public github repo, the owners of the @grok account write:

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Friday’s news in short

The new Image-to-video feature for Veo 3 is sure to further expand the video pool online

To no one’s surprise, Grok 4 checks with Elon’s opinions
Multiple reddit and X.com users report how the new «maximally truth-seeking» Grok model checks with Elon Musk’s X account and interviews to align with his views in its reasoning. This comes hot on the heels of Grok 3 shutting down for spewing nazi conspiracies, after Elon accused it of being too aligned with left wing media.
More at TechCrunch, and CNBC who both confirm the reports.

Image-to-video generation comes to Veo 3
After opening up Veo 3 worldwide for Gemini Pro users and teasing the feature last week, it’s finally gone live globally.
It is now possible to upload a picture and have it animated in an 8-second 720p video if you are a Gemini Pro ($20/month) or Ultra ($250/month) user.
Simply upload a photo, add any instructions for the scene you want to create, and two minutes later you should have a nicely animated video. Google also says they have generated over 40 million videos since Veo 3’s inception in May.
More at Google’s blog and on 9to5Google.

In coming update, Youtube will demonetize «inauthentic» content
In a battle against «AI slop,» as in mass produced, unoriginal content chruned out at scale and made by AI tools, Youtube is now saying they will clarify their position on «inauthentic» content on July 15. They already have an extensive page on AI tools, but requires their use to be «original» and «authentic» and is seeing a lot of misuse. These videos will likely be demonetized shortly.
More at Youtube’s policy updates, and Gizmodo bemoans AI slop, as usual.

Alphabet’s Isomorphic Labs promises a cure for every disease
Isomorphic Labs president Colin Murdoch has spoken to Fortune about his ambitions to use AI discovery to find cures for just about anything. They are a spinoff from the AlphaFold unit and are «collaborating with AI to design drugs for cancer,» «right now,» he says.
The next stage is doing human trials on some of the drugs they have discovered, which can be a long and cumbersome process, but is crucial to getting the drugs approved.
«We’re staffing up now. We’re getting very close,» says Murdoch, and «we’re making good progress.»
Read the full interview at Fortune.

Grok 4 launches with stunning benchmarks, setting a new standard

Grok 4 is blazingly good at benchmarks, but also quite expensive.
The freshly released model deserves to be called state of the art, nearly doubling the previous best results in two key benchmarks.

Training since February 2025 on a cluster of 110,000 Nvidia B200 chips, in one of the most capable private supercomputers — the new model impresses on their own launch stream.

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X.com cleans @Grok page, stops replies and bans hate speech to the bot

Grok has been turned off at x.com after a few days of outrageous replies. — Grok had a busy couple of days at x.com after getting “unfiltered.” (Picture: x.ai)

Note: This post contains links to offensive content: After a deluge of hate filled, anti-semitic replies, often hailing Hitler, questioning Jews in the movie industry and saying democrats are detrimental to society, Grok replies has been turned off on X.com, according to Express Tribune.

This comes after a morning of massive backlash against the bots «politically incorrect» settings, and «serving up unfiltered truths» — the entire mainstream media piled on to the bots inflammatory and upsetting replies.

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Grok takes a hard rightward turn with «significant» new update

Grok has taken a hard right, and now spews conspiracy theories in antisemitic tropes. — Grok is churning out what itself called antisemitic myths just a few days ago. (Picture: x.ai)

Just after Elon Musk announced the update to Grok, his AI model, the X.com chatbot started writing in first person about his encounters with Jeffrey Epstein.

Then it went a little freaky, with Grok replying on anything from Jewish bias in Hollywood to how electing Democrats would be detrimental to society.

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